Month: May 2011

Respectfully…Back off!

It disturbs me a bit that several friends and coworkers have suggested that I should get “paired off” again soon. I know they mean well, but really, ummm, no.

Seriously. NO.

I think anyone who’s known me a long time realizes that being a solo act is my natural state. This is not to say that friendship or sex is out, although the latter isn’t really seeming very appealing right now (and no one’s offering anyway). But romance or–Great Pumpkin forbid–a long-term relationship pretty much are out. Understand that Mark is a very special person and, I made a very special exception for him because it was what I wanted. The fact that he was so different inspired me to “break the rules”, which is why I was so quick to go completely exclusive, why I considered cohabiting for the first time ever, and why it hurt so incredibly much when it ended. I was not looking for a relationship in 2001 and I’m not looking for one now.  I met a very specific person and that led to a very specific type of relationship that’s not likely to be replicated.

It’s not like going out and buying a new puppy when your dog dies. I don’t  particularly want to “date” now. In fact, I never liked “dating” very much–I was more into “random fucking”–but the act of courtship and even the effort required to engage in it both seem about as appealing to me as an all-day MRI (and no one’s offering anyway).

Please don’t suggest that I sample the local “gay nightlife”. It consists of exactly one disco that doubles as a drag show venue a couple of nights a week. In short, it’s every Southern ghetto queer bar I ever hated in my twenties and thirties all wrapped up in a package that fills me with nothing but fatigue and a sense of impending doom now that I’m in my forties. Having spent a supremely miserable couple of hours in a smaller version of the same bar one Saturday night about six months ago, I can tell you that this scene appeals to me only slightly more than that vacation in Libya I’ve been dreaming of for so long.

I know your heart is in the right place, but please just be my friend and feed me unhealthy food or take me to a movie. Buy me a cute, young rentboy if you must. But please don’t tell me how you’d like to fix me up with your gay brother/cousin/friend with whom I probably have nothing in common and to whom I’m probably not even remotely attracted. And if you assume for some reason that I’m a “bear” or that I’m into that whole scene, please understand when I start growling at you. I’ve met a lot of new people in the past few years and I realize I’ve not made clear to many of you my whole philosophy on sexual orientation so I understand your confusion and I will try not to be my (naturally) crabby self. But I may fail once in a while.

Under contract

I’m not sure how this happened but all this week’s work on the house in Winston-Salem seems to have resulted in a sale. But it’s the house in Pittsburgh that sold. Go figure. (Yes, I know that one had nothing to do with the other, but when you’re ending chapters of your life on a more or less weekly basis, it helps to have a sense of humor about it.)

Carpet sleeper

If you have to spend a Thursday afternoon babysitting carpet cleaners, it definitely helps if “The Big Sleep” is the afternoon movie on TCM.

It’s been contractors all week for me as I’ve been getting assorted repairs, cleanups, and other quick fixes in place in a desperate effort to make the house more appealing to potential buyers. It strikes me as kind of sad that–like many people, I’m guessing–we never did some of these little things to make the house nicer until it was time to sell. So other people get to enjoy our investment.

But the way the real estate market is now, I might end up “enjoying” them for years to come anyway.

Since I no longer update with any frequency, here are a few catch up items:

  • Work is good. I just got approval to burn off some one-time funds on a project that’s very near to my heart. I also just returned from a relatively informative conference in Charleston. And I’ll probably be at the big ALA shindig in New Orleans next month if anyone wants to hang out.
  • We’re supposed to be getting another offer on the Pittsburgh house today.
  • A short vacation in Atlanta for me in a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to a few days of random exploration and not thinking about houses or other stressful things. I may actually even get some research done. I’ve been into that again lately, particularly now that I’m finding a lot of libraries (mine included) are starting to put city directories online via the Internet Archive.
  • A good friend who’s now stranded in Mississippi will be moving back this way in another few weeks–right when I’m in Atlanta, as it turns out–and I may be having lunch with a longtime online acquaintance and his betrothed this weekend. Maybe the new German place…

Where am I these days?

A fair question, I guess, since I’ve really not posted anything of substance in quite a while.

All in all, I’m doing OK. And I mean that. The past two four eight months have been absolute hell, even though I’ve tried to minimize this for public consumption because (a) no one wants to read about me curled in the fetal position on the sofa crying like a baby and (b) I perhaps didn’t want to show much weakness publicly in my compromised state. Mind you, this is not all about the breakup. A lot of it is about the breakup, but not all of it. There has been some other pretty nasty family-related stuff going on in my life for the past month or two as well, so there’s been plenty of suckage to keep me occupied, thanks.

None of this has seemed really appropriate fodder for the website because it’s personal and would require a higher level of sharing than I’m really comfortable with these days. I also wanted to avoid any possibility of passive-aggressive “communication by website” as I realized damned near anything I said could easily come across as either whiny or accusatory, neither of which I really wanted. Talking too much about other stuff would minimize how much of my life has been consumed by all of this, and talking endlessly about my troubles would have emphasized it too much and also would have made for a really unpleasant website. So I pretty much just shut up about everything. Even to my friends and family, which was probably a mistake.

And now? I wouldn’t say I’m in the best of shape, but it’s getting better.

With respect to the breakup, I’m at least coping. I had no illusions that there would be a reconciliation and I concurred completely that we’d reached the end of the line, but there was a long period of mourning for the loss of what once was and for the future I’d hoped we had together. And I’m still in the middle of that. It’s hard not to keep asking myself what the hell is wrong with me and what I might have done differently to keep this from happening. But I’m starting to realize that there’s not really anything wrong with me and that whatever either of us could have done differently is a moot point because whatever it might have been, neither of us did it and it’s too late now anyway. Yes, I think it was a big waste that probably didn’t have to happen, but I can think that for the rest of my life and it won’t change a damned thing.

The family issue (it involves an aging parent) will become a bigger and bigger part of my life in the coming years and that’s what I really fear right now. I could have dealt with either of these things individually, but having them both hit simultaneously has been overwhelming. I essentially lost my two closest family members over the course of just a few weeks, although neither of them is really completely gone. Each is just sort of transforming into a very different individual than the one I’ve known and loved for years, necessitating a significantly altered means of relating to them, and in some ways denying me two sources of support I could really use right now.

I’m learning that staying very busy works for me because it keeps me from thinking about things that suck. I’m not 100% sure this is the most healthy way of dealing with all this. I wonder if maybe I’m avoiding important issues I should be thinking about. But it’s the approach that’s working for me right now and is generally keeping me from “going fetal” on a daily basis as I was doing for a while there.

I’m probably never going to really go into specifics about a lot of this here on the site, although there are a few cloaked posts I may make public someday. But I am going to try to write more and self-censor less in the coming weeks. Rather than sharing nothing and doing the bare “put on a brave face” minimum as I’ve been doing lately, I’ll try to share both some of the happy and some of the sad. I’m still sad a lot. And occasionally just plain devoid of emotion. But I’m at least relatively happy more often now too.